the plowman's gone

Saturday, December 29, 2007

on christmas eve, the frenchmen said he didnt know the prayers in english. my cousin told him, from the drivers seat, as we pulled up to that church a block from the Greektown Casino, that my brother and i would be happy to put to the prayers to him in english. he winked, and we all had a chuckle to spite our ignorance.the priest wore a toupee visible from my perch three pews from the back. he quoted from the beloved holiday movie, "it's a great life" and there were murmurs. he did not correct himself.detroit, that haunted wasteland, only good now for passing through, the low end of the barometer of better things.i left there under heavy fog.

lynchburg, after cincinatti chili - chili over spagetti noodles, topped by shredded cheddar cheese, eat your heart out bob evans, white castle and cracker barrel - and the hot tub. i wore baseball shorts, borrowed from the adolescent girl cousin of JB. both of us in too-small shorts. budweiser. the water was 104 degrees. he didnt last; out we got, on the pleather couch i slept.

morn of the 28th: geese on a frozen plain of ice. fields of corn, cut to the stalk. due north on I-70, east of columbus, there was a billboard. five commandments were written there. the one about coveting, and four others. i turned to JB and said i thought there were ten and were these the most important, really? not half a mile later came another billboard with the subsequent five.

the army surplus store off main st in wheeling west virginia, just before a slice of pizza at dicarlos famous. we asked a woman wearing matching sweatpants and shirt, purple; asked after a good cheap bite of food. she told us the soup kitchen, where she was going; she smacked her lips and sashayed, just a little. said it was tasty AND free; we declined. found dicarlos famous, instead, there, at the confluence of the ohio and the wheeling, rivers. the cashier lady gave JB pepperoni despite his vegetarian inclinations towards cheese pizza.we rolled a log cut in the shape of a buoy or cannonball, we argued, into the river there. the milky lime-hued river culled it away.

in pennsylvania, finally, we peeked ground under sheath of snow.

also, the man in the orange vest who cut antlers from a deer brained by a Kenworth, last night.

the concrete siding of silos broken away, bare to the rebar.

aluminum siding on a double-wide, reinforcement for snows and cold yet to come, courtesy of "heartland Express of iowa city, iowa".

but new york, again, and werent we thankful. the new year in a city that reinvents itself, molts daily.